Getting the right hardware for your audio needs and tweaking it for best performance is almost an art. This includes having a powerful enough CPU to do what you need done.

The best hard disk subsystem for audio is definitely SCSI - the faster the better. With SCSI, you won't get drop outs while recording, although some of the newer Ultra DMA/66 hard drives my work well also. I still recommend SCSI for audio work, because it was designed for multi-processing and can work independant of the CPU. EIDE hard drive controllers require much more CPU processing than SCSI host adapters.

A fast AMD Athlon or Pentium III CPU is a must, due to the extreme processor intensive nature of audio processing for effects. I recommend a 600 Mhz CPU or faster, and faster is definitely better when it comes to audio processing.